“We are on the right track. Together, we are helping to move the company forward.”
What is responsiveness?
The traditional world of work is determined by patterns that were introduced during the industrial revolution. However, the demands of the 21st century are increasingly revealing the weaknesses of this approach. Instead, the modern world is more customer-oriented, especially in the IT sector, and it is more important than ever to adapt products and services to the specific needs of the project. Last but not least, employees and their willingness to embrace this type of company organization play an important role. This creates added value not only for the company, but also for each individual employee. In this industry, companies can no longer afford to let decisions regarding trivial matters go through several instances. In an agile working environment, rapid responsiveness and innovative approaches to problem solving are required. This is why we introduced the responsive company organization in January 2020 and distanced ourselves even further from traditional hierarchical thinking.
Responsiveness means the ability to react. These developments can currently be seen increasingly in the IT sector, which has the characteristics to make the introduction of a responsive company organization possible.
We are dynamic and digital. As soon as a company (also in other sectors) has these attributes, I think it should definitely consider introducing responsiveness. I think we are on the right track. We’ve seen that it works and I’m excited to see how we develop in the future.
(Anton Thome, Technical Consultant, Customer Cluster Finance)
The role concept
This also means that there is no longer a central decision-maker. Responsibility is distributed among various roles with the help of the role concept, which enables decentralized and independent work. Each role has clearly defined responsibilities and is free to make decisions in their area of responsibility. For this to work, the roles must be clearly defined and differentiated from one another. The tasks and responsibilities are anchored in the role definitions and can be viewed by every employee. This creates a sense of duty, but above all transparency.
One of the challenges was certainly to define the individual roles to such an extent that you ultimately know exactly what the associated tasks require of you. So that these can then be successfully implemented. Particularly with regard to customer projects and collaboration, the responsibilities are now spread across several shoulders and are no longer the sole responsibility of the Team Development role.
(Dirk Hammes, Senior Developer, Customer Cluster Finance)
Decentralization is an important feature in this context. Responsiveness divides the company into clusters that unite employees with similar areas of responsibility. For example, all employees working on projects in the financial sector form a cluster. There are also clusters for internal tasks such as sales, marketing, internal IT and office management. The clusters decide independently which roles they occupy and how important these are for the implementation of their cluster-specific strategy. They define a cluster-specific purpose that is aligned with the predefined corporate strategy. Each cluster is independent of the company management. All members of a cluster have equal rights. If previously defined roles are no longer deemed appropriate, they can be changed or removed at any time. The most important thing is to create a shared working environment in which every member can do their work efficiently and with pleasure.
